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Earlier in the month, I spent too many nights staying up late watching episodes from the first season of Mad Men, trying to catch up before the second season premiered. As kind of a counterbalance, I watched a bunch of episodes of the old crime show, Naked City, often alternating---one episode of Mad Men then an episode of Naked City then another episode of Mad Men. I didn't get a lot of sleep that week. I thought that since Mad Men is set in the early 1960s it would be interesting to compare its depiction of New York City nearly 50 years ago with how New York City was depicted at that time.

The main difference is that the New Yorkers of Mad Men are a strangely narcotized bunch. Their basic affect is ennui. Mad Men is set in a nation waiting for Prozac. The Manhattan of Naked City is full of hyper-active neurotics. Even the cops and criminals are tortured and tormented by angst and nameless dreads. Everybody's nerves are raw. Nobody can relax for a moment. It's a place where if you accidentally bump into someone on the street that person will either take a vicious swing at you or break down and start weeping or start monologing and blast you with a pseudo-poetic speech about the decline of civilization in words and cadences cribbed from Arthur Miller and Clifford Odets. Mad Men's Manhattan is a town of sleepwalkers. Naked City's Manhattan is full of brittle insomniacs jazzed up on caffeine, nicotine, lack of sleep, and their barely contained inner demons. What's naked in the Naked City is emotion.

Or to put it another way, it's a world in which William Shatner can play a paranoid artist who may have murdered his wife with all the patented hamminess he would bring in just a few years to his portrayal of Captian Kirk and not appear to be overacting in comparison with the other actors around him.

The look of the two versions of New York is very different too,
naturally. Mad Men is all warmly lit interiors---offices, cocktail
lounges, bedrooms---Naked City is, well, naked. It's all bare walls, bare streets, bare buildings, bare sidewalks. There are no trees! There are eight million stories in the naked city but none of them takes place in the shade. The lack of trees is startling. Scenes will be set on streets I've walked recently and I won't recognize them until a major landmark finds its way into a shot because no trees means, besides the absence of the trees' lines and shapes themselves, an absence of shadow, and without shadow there is no play of light, there's just a bland wash of brightness.

Even Greenwich Village and Riverside Drive come across as deserts of asphalt and brick.

Who was responsible for the greening (or re-greening) of New York?

Of course another reason for the lack of shadow on the streets is that there were many fewer skyscrapers outside of Midtown back then.

The people on the naked streets of the naked city are a homely bunch and rather badly dressed, as well. I think of people back then as having been more stylish, more elegant, more sophisticated at least in their grooming and in what they chose to wear to work and out on the town. Mad Men does a beautiful job of re-creating what I imagine my parents and their friends looked like when they were young. But the people in the Naked City do not dress like members of the Rat Pack or like Laura Petrie. The men wear cheap, ill-fitting suits and the women's dresses are drab sacks of thin-looking wool.

Nobody, not even the young actress girlfriend of the main detective, is dressed to impress. Instead, they all look dressed to flee, as if they're all recent refugees who expect they'll have to pack up and move again very soon.

And like I said, the people themselves are not a particularly good-looking crowd. Even the actress girlfriend is only pretty by comparison to other women around her. The stars, most of the guest stars, bit players, and extras are such a homely bunch that when the then only thirty year old Shatner shows up he is startlingly beautiful and the impossibly gorgeous anyway Diahann Carroll throws the look of every scene she's in out of whack, she just doesn't fit, to the point of looking as though she's a special effect, a poorly integrated bit of CGI.

The ugly costuming and unpretty casting are deliberate thematic choices, of course, to help emphasize Naked City's idea of New York City as Anytown, America writ large. The neuroses of the characters is a result of a combination of poetic license, the pop psychology of the times, and the reigning acting style of the day. So it's easy to get used to all of it, despite how it all differs from reality, memory, and Mad Men.

What shocked me and keeps shocking me every episode are the cars.

Apparently, by 1961, the days of shining Space Age sculptures of chrome and brightly painted steel were over. People were driving ugly tin boxes you couldn't look at without seeing the twisted heaps of metal and broken glass they'd turn into in the slightest fender bender.

Did people really ride around in those things?

Did my parents really let me get in one?

And without a seat belt?

I guess my memory is colored by the fact that the beautiful restorations of cars from that era are the cars worth restoring, the ones that were well-built and handsomely designed, and those were less than the majority of the cars on the road, apparently. All the rest were cheap tin boxes that were probably hardly worth the cost of scrapping when they broke down.

It's easy to forget that people routinely used to replace their cars every three to five years and it wasn't because they were rich or that they were suckers conned into it by Detroit and delusions about status and wealth.

Those tin boxes look as if they would have rusted out if you left them in the driveway overnight in the rain. They look as though they'd dent from the impact of being looked at too hard. Shine a flashlight on the finish too long, and that's it, the paint job's ruined.

Life in the naked city is better in a thousand ways than it was then, and worse in another thousand, but there's no arguing with the fact that nobody back could expect to own their car for ten years and, with just routine maintenance, have it looking and running almost as good as the day they bought it.

One thing hasn't changed though.

If you owned a car in the city then, you had just as much trouble parking it on your street as if you own one now.

Oliver Mannion, the blogger formerly known here as the twelve-year old, took up fishing this vacation.

This means that his father took up fishing too.

Oliver decided it would be a great father and son activity, and put that way I'm hard-pressed to think of something that I could have refused to go along with. Rock climbing, maybe. Ship in bottle building. Gourmet cookery. Southeast Asian martial arts movie fandom. Opera-going. Vegetable gardening. Flower gardening. Rock gardening. Cheese tasting. Drag racing. Kid gets into any of that on his own, fine, but he'd have to do it absent the company of dear old dad.

But never say never. Once upon a time, back when he was in kindergarten, he was into monster trucks and he decided it would be a great father and son thing if I took him to a monster truck rally.

I have to say. Gravedigger rules.

You've probably figured out by now that I am not the compleat angler nor do I aspire to be. That's the case, but I don't have anything against fishing. In fact, I'm a great admirer of fishing, as a sport and a hobby.

In the abstract.

I love A River Runs Through It, the novella and the movie.

But in reality fishing is just one of those activities designed by the gods to make me look and feel like a fool. Nancy Nall's husband, Alan, is an expert fly-fisherman. Every year he disappears into the wilds of Michigan's Upper Peninsula and the bass and salmon all compete with each other for the honor of gobbling one of his flies. Alan tried to teach me the basics of casting once and for about a minute I felt as though I might be able to learn how to do it right. The lesson didn't take. When it comes to fishing, I'm the world's worst student. Nothing about it gets into my head or my muscle memory and sticks. I've tried and tried and I can still tangle up my line while it's still on the reel just by looking at it. And no matter how much study I've put into it, no matter how much careful observation I've made of competent fishermen and women, no matter how much patient instruction I've received from the best of teachers, talk like the kind represented in this paragraph about fishing for stripers at night from Wyman Richardson's The House on Nauset Marsh might as well be in Magyar or Martian for all it makes a word of sense to me:

It is exciting to hook a fish at night. Quickly. two thumbs put pressure on the spool---not too much, for we believe in giving a fish his "head" and letting him run. But soon it becomes apparent that we do not know the direction of the run. One hand gropes for the battery switch, the other holds the rod and thumbs the reel at the same time. The headlight goes on, the line is seen to be dragging to the south. Patiently we wait, exert more thumb pressure, and finally the fish stops. For a brief moment nothing happens, and then suddenly the line goes limp. Lost? Then reel, reel for dear life; the fish is making a dead run inshore. If we are fortunate, and helped by the south drag on the line, we catch up to him before he shakes off. Then with taut line we carefully move to the south'ard until we are about opposite the fish. He is still strong, and makes short runs offshore. Our headlight now is turned toward the curling wave, and soon we see the umbrella-like dorsal fin and green back with silvery reflections as the fish turns and twists. But keep the pressure on, allow no slack! Work down toward the breaking wave, still with a taut line. Suddenly, a weakening of the strain tells us that the next wave will bring him in. It's a big wave. Back, back quickly, line taut, back up to the rising. Gradually, the wave recedes, and there is our bass, twelve pounds of him, lying on the sand. If we are wise, we grab him with one thumb in his mouth, firmly holding the lower jaw. If we slip a finger under the gill covert, we may get a painful spine cut in so doing. Anyway, get him up out of the reach of the sea, and never, never wash him until he is in the kitchen sink!

Of course I can understand what Richardson's describing here. What I can't do is see it happening because I can't see me doing it. All I can see is me losing my line or hooking my own ear or thumb. Oh, and getting that painful spine cut.

My grandfather, Pop Mannion's pop, was a fisherman. He had an impressive array of rods and reels hanging up on the wall of his summer camp on Lake George and when I was a kid I imagined that someday he would teach me how to fish. Pop Mannion's pop was a quiet, shy man and I always felt a little hesitant about approaching him about anything, so I never asked him, I would just sit and and stare thoughtfully at him at work whenever he was cleaning a freshly caught perch or trout for dinner. He never took the hint.

When I got a little older and wiser it dawned on me that if my grandfather had been the type of man who taught little kids how to fish he'd have taught Pop Mannion how to fish and Pop Mannion could have taught me. Pop Mannion has taught me many things. Fishing is not one them.

I think fishing was something my grandfather just preferred to do alone.

At any rate, my only truly successful fishing expedition occurred when I was nine. I caught twenty-three sunfish in a single morning. Impressed the heck out of myself. Of course, it dawned on me later that, since I was catching and releasing, I probably just caught the same four or five really stupid and hungry sunfish over and over again. But that was the last time I felt competent fishing. After that I started trying to actually learn how to do it and from there on out it's been one moral defeat after another.

That day, though, still sticks in my memory as one of the best days of my childhood, and part of what's best about it is that Pop Mannion was on the dock with me along with my brother, Luke, who caught at least a dozen sunfish himself. So, naturally, when Oliver Mannion decided we were taking up fishing together, I couldn't say, Sorry, kid, you're on your own.

Now, my only good day of fishing was a matter of sitting on a dock with my feet in the water, sticking a worm on a hook, dropping it into the water, and waiting patiently for a tug on the line. Turns out that this is pretty much all Oliver wanted to do too.

So several times last week we took our tackle and our bait and walked Andy and Opie like together down to the Mill Pond, sat down on the dock, stuck a worm on a hook, dropped it into the water, and waited patiently for a tug on the line.

Got lots of those.

Something down there struck early, struck often, and struck hungrily.

Struck without taking the hook too.

Ate us out of house and worm.

By the way, we were using sea worms, a much uglier and fiestier creature than the nightcrawlers I fed to the sunnies. Sea worms have visible legs and a mouths that you can see open and snap at your fingers as you try to impale them. They seem to know you're out to murder them and they fight for their lives, wriggling and reaching out to bite. I'm not sure I actually ever felt one bite, but since they look like creature out of Star Wars my imagination "felt" them trying to devour me whole and since I didn't have my light saber with me I tended to retreat reflexively---that's a way of saying that I'd drop them in a hurry when they went after my fingers.

Oliver loved this. Being able to laugh heartily at the old man is an essential part of the father-son bonding experience.

The worms all died honorably but in vain. Oliver landed not a single fish. His report on one of our expeditions is here. You can tell he more amused than disappointed. I think he was content to treat this year as practice. He wanted to get the feel of fishing, see if it was something he'd enjoy for its own sake, and if he caught a fish, fine, but the important part was finding out if he had fun trying to catch the fish.

Which he did.

Sure, he'd have liked to have reeled in something more than fish eggs and seaweed. And there was something down there, something big and hungry, that he just would have liked to have had a good look at. But he had a good time and he learned some basics and now he's ready for next year. There's a bridge at the far end of the Mill Pond where it flows into Stage Harbor and he'd like to try his luck there. And he's going to do some surf casting some night off Lighthouse Beach. First thing we do our first morning on the Cape is head on over to the bait shop.

What makes it better for me than whatever's in my usual glass of iced Lipton?

And how should I drink it to get all the healthful benefits? Do I need to buy a particular blend from a tea specialty shop? Is there a proper way to brew it?

What about all the bottled stuff? Looks like everything else convenient stores and supermarkets and fast food chains push at Americans to drink, another wet form of candy. Do I get any benefits from drinking mass produced green tea candy drinks?

Anything that will help me cut back on soda and coffee's got to be good for me, but whenever some great new wonderful comes along that's supposed to anti-oxidize me, flush all the toxins from my system, fill me up with renewed vim, vigor, and verve, keep me young, strong, and enthusiastically sexy until I'm 80, and otherwise make my doctor and dentist happy with me, I can't help thinking of that scene in Woody Allen's Sleeper.

A problem with Mad Men's designers' perfect recreations of the late
1950s and early 1960s in the look of the characters, the clothes they
wear, the offices and living rooms and bars they work, live, and play
in, all the period details rendered exactly right is that it can fool us
into thinking Mad Men is a period piece.

It allows us to kid ourselves into thinking that the bad behavior of
the characters is as much a part of the times as fedoras and wood
paneled offices, that their materialism, their hollow ambitions, their
sexism, their phoniness---above all, the phoniness---are all vices
peculiar to back then.

Mad Men is not about the time it's set in, 1960 in Season One, 1962 in
Season Two, which begins tonight at 10 EDT on AMC.. The fashions, the trappings, the historical references,
the depictions of the, to us, crazy social mores and ridiculously rigid
but cartoonish gender roles, the glimpses at the pop culture and fads
of the time are meant to place us in an alien world. The Madison
Avenue and suburban Ossining are like those planets on Star Trek where
the inhabitants are living as if in Chicago of the 1920s or as if Nazi
Germany won World War II or as if the Roman Empire never fell. All the
attention to period detail is a trick. We're meant to think of Mad Men
as a period piece but creator-producer Matt Weiner and his writers and
designers and directors are inventing their own universe in which their
are no real people. There are only roles for people to play.

In this
universe, every person is an invention, either of the person playing
the part (Dick Whitman has invented Don Draper) or of other inventions
(it's hard to say who invented Betty Draper, her husband, her mother,
or her friends and neighbors---when Betty makes an attempt to create a
self for herself, it's as a fashion model, which is to say as a doll
for other people to pose and dress; the only self she can imagine for
herself is even less of a real person than the one she's been handed by
others). In short, everyone is a fraud. And everyone is leading a
double life. Nobody wants the life they have. Nobody knows himself or
herself except in how well the fake self they present to the world
fools other people. It's a world in which people are each other's
audience. It's a demanding audience but an audience of extremely
limited imagination, expecting each other not just to play a part but
to play that part strictly to type, even as they inwardly chafe and
rebel against the same restrictive demands being placed on themselves.
It's a world of bad actors, obvious phonies overplaying their parts,
and the only way it can continue is through a mutual agreement: "I
won't point out what a fake you are, if you don't point out what a fake
I am."

Seven-thirty, Friday morning. It's pouring rain here. I'm
huddled inside a coffee shop instead of out for a walk or a bike ride.
The guys at the next table are huddled inside of a coffee shop instead
of out on the driving range, where they'd intended to be. They are in
their early thirties, but dressed like college guys about to go play
Frisbee, in t-shirts, gym shorts, and flip-flops. From their
conversation I gather they are married, on vacation together with their
wives, one is the father of a very small child, the other has a
sister-in-law who is sharing their vacation with them. The
sister-in-law seems to need as much attention as the baby, according to
him, but he's one of those guys who would talk about his adult
sister-in-law as if she's a spoiled child. They are both one of those
guys. Just the second guy is a little more so.

They work in offices. The first one has the more demanding job and
he's trying to escape it. He's been interviewing around. His best
prospect is an even more demanding job, one that will have him
traveling a lot. The second guy asks if the first guy's potential new
boss has kids of his own. A boss with kids might be more understanding
that a guy with a baby can't spend his every waking minute at work or
dealing with work. The potential boss has two kids. One's in college,
the other's a sophomore in high school. No way, then, of gagueing.
The potential boss doesn't have the same family demands on his time,
but maybe he still remembers what it was like. The first guy can't
say. He doesn't sound hopeful about landing the job.

The second guy may have an easier time of it at his office, but he
doesn't like his job any better than the first guy likes his. The
difference is that with very little effort he can pretend to be
enjoying what he does and make his bosses think he's a good guy to have
around the place. In other words, he keeps his job, and therefore his
lifestyle, by being a complete fraud. In his way, he has to give up as
much of himself to his job as the first guy has to.

But work isn't really on their mind this morning. Golf is. They
have a ten-thirty tee time somewhere. They're both optimists. They're
convinced that the rain will let up by then. What has them worried is
that things might have backed up on the course. Probably parties with
earlier tee times canceled. But others might have decided to hang
around and wait out the rain. The guys might not be able to get out on
the course until much later. How are their wives---known to the guys
as they---how are they going to react to that?

The second guy isn't worried about his wife, so much. He's worried
about how the first guy's wife's reaction might affect---infect---the
feelings of his wife and sister-in-law. They will band together, no
matter what, he thinks, and if the first guy's wife is ok with the news
that that the guys are going to be out all day instead of part of it
then his wife and her sister will be ok with it too. But...

"She'll be fine, won't she?" he asks hopefully. "What does she
expect you to do on day like today anyway? Sit inside? Do girly
things with them? Take the baby shopping?"

The first guy says he has no clue.

Of course he has more than a clue. He knows. The question isn't
whether or not she'll be angry. It's how angry and for how long and
how she will make him pay.

He decides to call her. Out comes the cell.

"Hi. It's me. I'm sorry. Did I wake you up?"

His voice has gone softer, full of concern, with a note of pleading
already. It sounds fake as all get out. He's playing a part. The
solicitous husband. What I can't tell, what I'll never know, is if
this a part he regularly plays or if he thinks he has to adopt it for
the situation. What I also can't tell, what I'll also never know is if
this is a part he's written for himself or is someone else wrote it for
him. If it was someone else, is that someone else his wife? Or is she
playing a part too? Have they both been assigned parts to play in
their own marriage? Are they each trying to be what they think the
other wants them to be? Are they each trying to be what they think
they are expected to be, and who's doing the expecting?

In a conversation in the Drapers' kitchen, Betty Draper and her friend
and neighbor, Francine Hanson, agree that their husbands are "better"
when they're at home and not at the office---better as in more likable;
better as in nicer, kinder, more loving, more open-hearted; but also
better as in not sick, as in well, or getting well, better as in
recovering.

This, by the way, is in an episode that comes after one in which Don Draper leaves his daughter's birthday party to go pick up the cake and does not come back until long after the party's ended.

Clearly, both women believe that their husbands are not their real selves when they are at work, that they are only pretending to be the kind of men their bosses and colleagues expect them to be. Their real selves, their better selves, are the men they are when they are at home with their wives and children.

It doesn't seem to occur to either Betty or Francine that their husband might be pretending at home, that his real self is his office self. It wouldn't occur to either woman that their husbands might be pretending in both places, that the men's real selves aren't allowed to show them up at home any more than they are allowed to show up at the office. And it certainly wouldn't occur to them that they themselves are the writers of the scripts their husbands are following around the house.

What's more, it doesn't occur to Betty (and probably not to Francine either) that she is playing a part too, that she has no real self, that she, the person she thinks she is, doesn't exist. Betty literally can't feel herself. She can't feel her life. But it doesn't dawn on her that the numbness in her hands is symbolic. She can't feel because there is nothing to feel. It's all made up.

The story of Mad Men is the story of how Dick Whitman created and now maintains a new life for himself under the name Don Draper. The central conflict of that story is the ways that life is threatened with exposure as a fiction. Oddly enough, it's Don Draper who presents the chief threat. Don Draper doesn't like being Don Draper any more than Dick Whitman liked being Dick Whitman. A fiction can't maintain itself as a fiction if it is aware of itself as a fiction. Draper doesn't feel his life any more than Betty feels hers. It's no wonder that Don is happiest when he is with his bohemian lover Midge Daniels. It isn't that Midge allows him to be his true self. It's that she doesn't expect him to be himself or any self when they're together. She doesn't care who he is. Midge, then, offers Don an escape from having to be.

Don and Betty aren't the only characters living their lives as characters.

And it's not just the characters on Mad Men who are playing parts, pretending to be people they are not, in order to get along at work and make life easier at home.

Mad Men is set in a fictional universe that looks like New York City in the early 1960s but it is about living as fake, about not being real. Which is not a problem exclusive to that time and place.

Back to Friday morning. It's eight-thirty now. Still raining hard. Outside the coffee shop the parking lot is flooding. The guys at the next table are still planning to make their tee time. They're so sure the rain will let up that they're going to head to the driving range now. The second guy is insistent.

"You should get a job at a driving range," the first guy says. There's a note of irritation and impatience in his voice.

"I should!" the second guy agrees. "I really should. Can you imagine that?"

The first guy isn't listening. The phone call to his wife ended inconclusively. She hadn't asked him to come home, but he doesn't feel as though he has permission to stay out all day either. He'd offered to bring his wife something from the coffee shop and she'd turned him down. "Maybe I'll bring her something anyway."

"I thought she said she didn't want anything," the second guy says. He sounds a bit panicked. He doesn't want to stop at the house on the way. "We go there, we'll never get out again."

"Just some hot chocolate. We can bring them some hot chocolate. Your sister-in-law like hot chocolate?"

"Hell if I know. Why bother? Let's just go."

"It'd be a nice gesture," the first guy says. "It'd be a good thing to do."

We try to visit the museum at least once every vacation and whenever we've gone he's done what he did yesterday, spent the whole time downstairs doing what he calls "just sitting and thinking." While he's doing his sitting and thinking though he likes to chat with the docents and help them out with their lectures and demonstrations. He's always had an encyclopedic bent and been good at gathering and cataloging facts. These days his preferred field of study includes dwarfs, elves, and orcs. But for a long time before that it was animals. (Before that, it was planets. He was three.) He has a sharp eye, an empathetic nature, and a high tolerance for the grotesque and the gruesome among the less than cute other kingdoms and phylums. He can pick up a skate and look a grouper in the eye.

In that earlier post, I reported that there were two bookstores and now there's one. I was wrong. There were three bookstores. Now there are two. The third bookstore was, he thought, a children's bookstore, but that's changed. And while Where The Sidewalk Ends might never measure up in his estimation to Cabbages and Kings, it has chairs and room for a six-foot tall fifteen year old to spread out while he's looking over the latest from Terry Brooks.

Was thinking while I was watching it tonight that the movie spends way too much time and effort trying to set up and sell the idea that Batman is not just an anti-hero, he's a quasi-villain and that the people of Gotham City---which is to say, people---need a quasi-villain to defend and protect them because they aren't ready for a true hero. Gotham is a fallen world. The people who live there---here, everywhere is Gotham City---are the children of a fall, the fall. The crime that engulfs them is their own fallen, evil nature unleashed and turned against themselves. The Joker is right. For now. Batman is what people both hate about themselves and the only weapon they can use to destroy what they hate about themselves. Batman is the self against the self. That's why his chief Nemesis, the Joker, is his mirror image. Batman is civilization as it is, human nature held in check by a few rules. The Joker is human nature without those rules. There can be no true heroes until people themselves are heroic. They need a savior. The savior will only come when the time is right, which is when the people are ready, which is to say when they don't really need to be saved anymore.

Until then, all we have is Batman.

The Dark Knight.

That seemed to me too much for one movie. But this isn't one movie. It's part of a series of movies and the plan for those movies don't include only one hero.

What The Dark Knight did, and did pretty well, I think, was clear a space in the Batman myth that can only be filled by one hero, who is not Batman. We may not get to see the series completed because his movie, the one that was intended to start the series that was going to intersect with the Batman movies, bombed. But the space for him is there and it doesn't have to be filled on the screen because it's easy to fill it in our imaginations. The ending of the Dark Knight contains the whole story of the Knight of Light.

Got mad at myself this morning when I was out walking around and as I sometimes do when I’m mad at myself and alone I started to tell myself off in no uncertain terms. Out loud.

I was giving myself a pretty stern talking to and I had worked my way about halfway through my list of reasons why I’m an idiot before I realized this conversation wasn’t taking place inside my head. What shut me up was the realization that along with my own voice I’d also been listening to the sound of typing and suddenly I wasn’t listening to it anymore. I looked around and saw that I was passing by one of the quainter and handsomer of the old inns in town. Sitting out on the front porch was a young woman with a cup of coffee and her laptop.

Who knows what she’d been working on? Email. A novel. Her MySpace page. Her blog. Whatever it was, she wasn’t working on it anymore. She was too busy staring at me. She was wearing the obvious look of someone trying to decide if she was dealing with a drunk or a lunatic and, whichever, whether or not he was dangerous. Our eyes met. There was an awful second of mutual embarrassment, probably augmented by stark terror on her part—“Oh no! He’s going to talk to me!”—and then she quickly went back to her typing and I hurried on down the road, my head down and my jaw clamped shut.

Foolish as I felt, though, I couldn’t help laughing—silently—at the possibility that she was a blogger too and she was doing to me what I’m now doing to her, turning me into a character in her vacation notebook.

“Some crazy old coot just staggered by ranting to himself about—“

You’ll have to read her blog to find out what crazy thing I was ranting about.

Google Chatham Surf Side Inn coot.

Serve me right if you find her post.

I wouldn’t complain though. Or care. Much. Whatever she wrote about me, I wouldn’t take it personally. I wouldn’t see it as me. I would see it as part of her attempt to put her world into words in order for her to make sense of it. I would see it as writing.

Turning people into characters is a regular feature of my blog. Turning people into words, I could say. If this blog is about any one thing, it is about the writing. It is about turning the world into words. My words. A less than generous way to describe what I, like most other bloggers and writers, am up to is trying to colonize your head. I’m trying to force you to use my words to think about what I’ve been thinking about. I prefer to call what I’m doing sharing.

“Here,” I’m saying, oh so generously, “is something I thought you’d find interesting. Pardon me, if the only way I can share it with you is by turning it into words of my choosing.”

It doesn’t matter what you look at, Thoreau said, what matters is what you see.

This was a boast, his way of saying that his readers shouldn’t judge his writing on his chosen subject but on the words he's used to describe his subject. Some supposedly fine writers wrote badly on great themes. Thoreau wrote very well about seeds. Better to see a lot in a single seed waiting to be planted on a plain desk in a homemade cabin on an obscure pond in a small village in the homely state of Massachusetts than to go to Europe, visit all the capitals, tour the cathedrals and the ruins, and notice nothing.

But what you choose to look at is just going to have an effect on what you see. Thoreau could spend hours looking at seeds. I spend hours looking at people. He did too, but he was happier with seeds. I look at people. I turn them into words, then I share the words. I don’t worry much about the ethics of this. Before I started blogging, I never would have thought there were any ethics to consider. Writers turn people into words the way painters turn them into splotches of paint on a canvass. The words belong to the writer, the splotches belong to the painter, neither the words nor the splotches are the people they are meant to describe or represent, and there’s no reason for anyone to complain or to care. Most of the time nobody does care or complain because the words and the splotches don’t get identified. In the four years I’ve been blogging I’ve only unpublished two posts and both times I did it was because the person I’d turned into words in the post recognized themselves and wrote to complain. I have to admit that I wouldn’t have taken down either post if I hadn’t decided on my own that the words I’d used were unfair or contained too many clues to the originals’ identity.

Usually, I don’t worry when I write about a person I saw any more than I worry about it when I write about a bird, a movie star, a politician, or something else non-human.

Still, I’m a spy and, objectively, I’m violating people’s privacy twice—once when I do the spying and again when I give you the words that let you spy on them second-hand.

As I said, though, I don’t worry about this.

So what’s different about posting photographs?

Last Wednesday evening we went up to Nauset Beach. To the young men Mannion’s delight, the waves were high. Old man Mannion was pretty delighted about it too. There were surfers in the water. Real surfers on real surf boards really not watching what they were doing. They were surfing too close in. One rode a wave right at me and would have taken my head off if I hadn’t warned him off. He bailed just in time.

There was a girl at the water’s edge when we hit the beach and set up our chairs and stuff. Fifteen or sixteen. Tall, lithe, beautiful, like a ballerina. Coffee with cream colored skin with a touch of cinnamon. She wasn’t in a bathing suit. She was wearing white shorts and a tank top and had a pink sweater hugged around her shoulders like a shawl. She was all alone, standing perfectly still and staring straight out to sea. Nothing extraordinary about this, except that she hadn’t moved, at all, by the time we’d arranged everything and were ready to head into the water and she was still there, no sign of having moved, when we came out to dry off the first time, and she was still there, in the same spot, in the same pose, when we came back in again this time to pack up and go eat at the snack stand back up in the dunes, and she was still there when we’d gathered our stuff and started off the beach. That puts her there for close to an hour.

At that age you think a lot of deep thoughts. But still that’s a long time to stand so still.

Now here’s the thing.

I took her picture.

And I felt bad about that.

But I took pictures of the surfers too.

And I did not feel bad about that.

There’s more.

Obviously I do not feel bad about writing about her or about the surfers. But I would nor feel right about posting the picture I took of her. It’s in long shot. You can’t see her face. You’d have to know her well to be able to identify her. It’s extremely unlikely she would ever find it on the web herself. But I still won’t post it.

I don’t have any problem posting a picture of one of the surfers though.

I have another picture of another one of the surfers. He’s carrying his board across the beach. Big, beefy guy with a long ponytail. And she’s in it. She’s there in the background, off to the left, at the waterline, staring out to sea. And if I hadn’t written about her I’d have posted that picture.

There are a lot of other people in that picture. I wouldn’t have been at all concerned about their feelings either.

I’m not sure I understand this, so I can’t explain it, why I think writing about her here is ok, but posting her picture would be wrong, why I think writing about the surfers and posting a picture is ok.

I don’t know if I’m making distinctions without differences, if I’m kidding myself, or what.

I just know that there’s something bothering me now that hadn’t bothered me much before.

Foggy this morning when I was out walking around, talking to myself. After I gave that young woman on the inn porch fodder for her blog, if she wants to use it, I wandered down to the small beach that’s up around the riprap from Lighthouse Beach. The sand was heavy and wet from the rain that had fallen overnight. I had the beach to myself, except for two seagulls and a plover down at the waterline and a cormorant cruising by in the shallows. The plover flew off as soon as it became aware of me. The gulls glared at me over their shoulders and hung around for a bit, just to let me know they weren’t scared of me, they just didn’t care for my company, before they flapped away. The cormorant disappeared into the fog, keeping its thoughts about my presence a complete mystery. A skimmer flashed past, equally inscrutable.

The gulls came back soon enough, though. Or some gulls did. Could have been the same pair. Who can tell. But one of them had just deposited a blue crab on the beach. The crab lay on its back, legs and claws flailing in the air, while the gull studied it, with the cool eye of a practiced killer trying to decide just which spot on the crab’s belly to drive its beak into. Then the bird saw me.

I wasn’t about to come near, but he clearly thought I was out to steal his breakfast. He lifted his wings, thrust his head and neck out, opened his beak horribly, and made a run at me. I stood my ground and he veered off and flew away. But he circled back and landed on the beach again, a dozen yards away from me and the crab. He paced back and forth on the sand, giving me the evil eye, thinking, I’m pretty sure, The nerve of some humans.

I waited where I was, giving him time to realize I had no intention of rescuing the crab. Probably could have given him all day. He was too busy giving me time to realize he wanted to be left alone with his snack. After a while, he gave up and flapped off. I saw no point in leaving the crab to suffer now. I went over to him, and remembering what I’d just read about blue crabs in Wyman Richardson’s The House on Nauset Marsh, that they are mean little buggers who unlike other crabs can reach over their shoulders with their claws to snap at you if you try to pick them up from behind, I used my coffee cup to flip him right side up. He showed me that Richardson knew his blue crabs by trying to pinch holes in the cup before he scuttled away.

He started off in good crab-fashion, sideways, but then he began turning around and around in circles, as if tied to a stake. That’s where and how I left him. When I reached the top of the beach I turned around and saw three seagulls swooping in towards him.

The fog was heavy enough that I couldn’t see more than twenty or thirty yards out. Across the water from where I was standing is a long spit of sand that reaches all the way here from Orleans. Up there it’s called Nauset Beach. Down here it’s known as North Beach. The water on this side of it is called Pleasant Bay the whole length of itself.. Somewhere out on North Beach something was making a melancholy sound like wind blowing steadily through a chink in a drafty house. There happen to be a bunch of drafty houses over on North Beach, cabins really, large shacks in some cases, but enough of them that I suppose the wind whistling through them together could be heard where I was. But it might not have been the wind. It might have been a colony of seagulls bemoaning their sad lots in life together. There was a roughness in the sound too, a sound that might have been barking along with it, so there might have been a herd of seals out there. The sound could have been a combination of a wind, gullsong, sealcall, and my imagination. I don’t know.

Whatever it was, it, they, the wind, the shacks, the birds, the seals, the by-now pecked apart and devoured crab, the gull I robbed of his breakfast with my intrusive humanness, none of them are going to mind that I’ve turned them into words.

Uncle Merlin's street runs down a hill to the Mill Pond, which after all these years I still have trouble thinking of as a pond. For one thing, it's bigger than many of the puddles in the cornfields that they call lakes in Indiana, and the tranquil wet spots in the woods Upstate New Yorkers call ponds are mere spills from small glasses in comparison. And the wildlife's all wrong. My field guide to lakes and ponds is useless. Bull frogs don't sit on lily pads in this pond. Painted turtles don't bask on any logs. Finally, the water's salt water.

Nope. The Mill Pond can call itself a pond if it wants to but what it really is is ocean.

The Mill Pond is a crazy 8 shaped leak from Stage Harbor and if you had a mind to it, you could put your boat in at the dock at the end of the street here and sail to Portugal.

The upper bowl of the pond is banked in two-thirds the way around by clay dunes ranging from a few feet to thirty feet high, covered with beach plum, chokecherry, salt spray roses, bigtooth aspens, and poison ivy. The houses that sit on top and overlook the pond are year-rounders, with good-sized and well-tended lawns. In a very real way, the pond is a part of everybody's backyard, it's a very suburbanized bit of ocean, and the birds in the neighborhood are mostly suburban not ocean-going birds. Gulls do visit the pond, more of the quieter, more dignified black-backed gulls, fortunately, than the rude and raucous herring gulls that are to sea birds what dandelions are to wildflowers, and there are a couple of ospreys who find the fishing hereabouts to their liking. Once upon a time I came across a night heron nesting in the cordgrass.

But far more common are the sparrows, robins, finches, cardinals, and grackles who peck through the rockweed and eel grass, ride the branches of the wax myrtles in the salt breezes, and roost on top of the dock pilings. The other morning I watched a redwinged blackbird harry a crow down from the top of one of the bluffs and out across the water, the crow finally taking refuge in the bow of one of the small boats swinging at anchor just off the dock.

I used to spend a lot more time wandering around the Mill Pond but for more than a few years now I've been taking it for granted, treating it as just a piece of pretty scenery on the way from here to there and from there and back again. Saturday morning, though, I decided to take a look at it for its own sake once again.

The sandy path that runs around the pond is usually some degree of damp, ranging from slightly moist to submerged to drowned, depending on what the tide's been doing. Sometimes a walk around the pond is actually a barefoot wade through the pond. Saturday I was able to keep my shoes on and my feet dry which made stopping to poke around easier and more comfortable.

The marine life in and around the pond makes its existence known by leaving evidence of its usually violent demise. I turned up the usual momento mori.

Evidence of human life is far more ubiquitous and livelier. But I'd never come across anything as lively as this before.

Yes, those bottles are full. The caps were all on tight. Empty Pabst cans were strewn all about. I'm guessing they were remains from the same party. How much Pabst do you have to drink before you forget that you have all this Corona waiting?

Maybe they forgot to bring limes.

Or a bottle opener.

There's a waste can at the end of the dock. I picked up all the cans I could find, but I left the bottles right there, intending to come back several times during the day to see how long before somebody with a vague sense of unfinished business from the night before remembered or somebody else with a powerful thirst and no sense thought they'd struck lucky or another somebody else with a conscience decided to be a good citizen. I didn't make it back again until Sunday.

The bottles were gone.

It's entirely possible that the tide carried them out and now they're bobbing their way to Portugal.

“Someday, they shall name a roll for me.”The Kaiser lifts his left leg and places his foot against his right knee.He steadies himself, his arm around the geisha on his left.His immense body trembles sending ripples across his skin.The geisha who serves as the audience smiles in earnest politeness.

The Kaiser throws out his right arm and bows his head.“I have learned that love can only go so far.”His helmet clangs on the ground.“With your help I must learn to turn,And balance.”

It's not all sand, surf, and seafood for us down here. Occasionally we go in for some culture. Play was Thornton Wilder's The Matchmaker, the play Hello Dolly! is based on and it was put on by the Ohio University Players, a summer rep company in residence here, made up mostly of college and graduate school theater majors with some New York pros brought in to mentor the kids and take on roles that are beyond the talents and skills of the student players. Julie Harris is going to be starring in The Effect of Gamma Rays on Man in the Moon Marigolds at the end of the season. The parts of Dolly Gallagher Levi and the irascible merchant of Yonkers, Horace Vandergelder, were played by professionals.

I was in a production of The Matchmaker in college and after the show the twelve year old, Oliver Mannion, asked me which was better, this one or ours. Not having seen ours, I couldn't really say. Our audiences seemed to enjoy our shows. They laughed a lot. I think our production was more rollicking. We played it at a faster pace too. We played it on a bigger stage as well, and our romantic lead, the actor who played Cornelius Hackl, had more room to move about, diving over and behind furniture, throwing himself across the floor, running, leaping, collapsing in dizzied heaps, and showing off all the tricks he'd learned from watching Dick Van Dyke reruns all the time when he was growing up. He was an audience favorite, as a result, but I thought then and still think he was miscast and would have been better in the part of Cornelius' young sidekick, Barnaby Tucker.

I played Cornelius.

And I'm inclined to say that their Cornelius was better because he was better-suited for the part and that their Barnaby was better than our Barnaby and better than I would have been even.

Our Dolly was just fine, even if she wasn't a professional, but our Vandergelder didn't come close to theirs. Theirs was funny and charming, in an irascible way, and he didn't let his Cornelius or his Barnaby or his Dolly steal the show out from under him.

But there's no way I'll ever know, is there? I enjoyed their show and didn't spend much time thinking about our show while I was watching it. Doesn't mean our show wasn't on my mind.

Thursday when I went to the theater to pick up our tickets I loitered in the lobby to study the faces of the members of the company in their headshots which were displayed on the wall just outside the ticket office, trying to guess who would be playing which part, an idle game that was really a matter of me asking myself which face I'd cast in which role if all I had to go on was faces. But I was pretty sure I'd picked out the actress who'd be Mrs Molloy, the young widowed ladies hatmaker who wishes she could live up to her reputation as a wicked woman, on the grounds that if you had in your company of actors those freckles, that cream-colored skin, that snub nose, those pink lips, and that tangle of black hair and you did not attach them to a character named Irene Molloy it's because you also had another perfect arrangement of freckles, cream-colored skin, pink lips, snub nose, and tangle of black hair that belonged to another, better actress and you'd cast her. Since there was only one of these maps of Ireland up on the wall I figured she must have been nabbed for the part and I was right.

Our Irene Molloy had the right combination of freckles, cream-colored skin, snub nose, pink lips, and dark hair too, by the way.

The other lucky guess I made was based on what I call the Carol Burnett Syndrome. Look for the cutest girl who also looks like she has the best sense of humor and the most mobile features and assume she will appear onstage in a hideous costume with the make-up trowled on to make her ugly, old, foolish, or otherwise comically grotesque, playing a small part that she will milk for every last ounce of laughs. I found my candidate and sure enough, she turned up as a clownish servant in an oversized mob cap, giant circles of rouge on her cheeks---meant to make her literally apple-cheeked, but combined with her mob cap and apron, making her look like a half-crazed Raggedy Ann---speaking with a yumpin yiminey accent that made the Muppet Show's Swedish Chef's seem subtle. And she got her her laughs.

Deservedly, and talentedly. A true ensemble player, she saw her character as an extension of the ditsy, self-dramatizing, and overly-romantic rich old lady she works for, doing the rich lady's comic legwork, fetching, carrying, feeding her straight lines and capping off jokes and bits of business in ways that made what was already funny funnier.

Every high school drama club and college theater department seems to have one of these Burnetts. (Professional companies go out and hire character actresses of the required shape, look, type, and age.) Often they're pretty enough, as well as being more than talented enough, that they ought to be playing ingenues but the companies also include an even prettier actress who can handle a love scene but can't do comedy to save her life. This is why, although I never saw who was in there, I can't help thinking that hers was one of the female voices I overheard talking in the office while I was standing there studying their pictures. She, if it was her, and another actress, were talking about a musical she was going to be in, in which she had a small part. The female lead was a "bit of an airhead" who can sing up a storm but apparently doesn't know what to do with herself onstage when there's no music backing her up. Whoever they were, both sounded as if they were used to this sort of thing and even understood and supported the reasons for it, despite the fact that it cost them big roles they coveted and could probably shine in.

I wasn't trying to eavesdrop. I never try. I just do. And while I was still there two more actresses entered the office and added their voices to the conversation and one of them delivered the news that his girlfriend had been at the show the other night.

They talked over each other excitedly, so I'm not sure I got this right, but as far as I could tell one of the actors in the company is having a summer fling with one of the actresses (who may have been one of the actresses in the office) but it's a casual fling and neither one of them appears to think it ought to matter to the girlfriend back home, although it might have been nice if he'd mentioned that the girlfriend was coming into town to see the show.

This has caused some awkwardness for the actress who has to pretend she and the actor are just pals for a few days.

As I was listening to this, I was thinking theater people.

I was thinking it not with a sneer but with a smile of fondness and a pang of nostalgia.

Something else was going on in my imagination as I was looking at those photographs and trying to match faces with the characters they possibly played. I was looking for the faces of our company, trying to find resemblances, trying to remember us as we were then. And I did it. We never had our headshots posted outside our theater but I could see them there nevertheless. Three of the girls in the cast I could see with special clarity.

Of course I did.

I dated them.

Not all at once. And not during run of the show. But that same year. Our Dolly, our Irene Molloy, and our comic servant. That same year I also went with two girls in the next play I was in and one of the girls who did make-up for that show and a girl who lived three floors down in my dorm who was friends with the girl who did make-up.

Remind me again why I left the theatre.

Now you may think I'm bragging, and I guess it does look like I had a heck of a year. But at the time I thought I was practically a monk because another guy in our show---he played the head waiter at our Harmonia Gardens; he was better than theirs---dated all of them.

I don't mean all the girls I dated. Though he did.

I mean all of them.

Every girl in the cast. Every girl who worked backstage. Every girl who was friends with every girl in the cast and every girl who worked backstage.

Every girl.

You scoff.

But if you'd known him and you were girl he'd have dated you too.

Resistance was futile.

Funny thing was, he wasn't at all good looking. He was skinny and kind of homely. In fact, he looked like a rat with a blond afro.

But he was a rock star.

Fronted the best band in a college town full of good bands.

His signature song was Van Morrison's Moondance. He sang that one and at the end of it there'd be at least eight girls at the foot of the stage ready to run away with him right then and there.

Every other girl in the audience was being held back by a boyfriend.

So I dated three girls from our show? Big deal.

He dated all of them.

Except one.

My friend Annie.

She was the only one I knew who'd ever turned him down and meant it for good and all.

Annie was something of a female him. She was skinny and kind of homely but if she decided she wanted you, you were hers. And she didn't even have to sing Moondance.

It wasn't the case that she decided she didn't want him. Nor was she standing on a principle. She'd just decided that it would be good for him if he couldn't have the whole candy store whenever he wanted it.

By the way, Annie wasn't one of the three.

I was another one who wasn't going to be allowed to run riot in the candy store. Plus, she worried about me. She was afraid she might eat me alive and leave nothing behind but a few well-picked bones.

On Main Street, in the morning. Couple of workmen about to get into their pickup with their coffee. First guy, climbing in on the passenger side, says, "What did you tell them? You did it, right? You told them you did it, I hope. How they gonna know. That's the beauty of it. You put the dry wall over it, they're not going to tear it off again, look for themselves. Tell 'em you did it."

Town Landing. Bassing Harbor. North Chatham. Eight AM. Thursday. July 18, 2008. Somehow the photo posted itself twice. A friend suggested I post it a third time so that there's on picture for each of the "blues" in the post's title. If I was better at photo manipulation I'd fix it so your eye focused on the sky in the first shot, the water in the second, and the door in the third. Pretend I'm that good.

The first is the fifteen year old who hasn't been making that study of dwarf mythology and culture for nothing. He's been working on a novel. It's been rough going. He's having a hard time not sidetracking himself with new characters and ever-increasing backstory and exposition. So far he's written a single chapter.

The second writer is Kristina Skilling. She's the author of the recently-published Satreih, a fantasy adventure novel for young adults. She was in town today, signing copies of her book. The fifteen year old bought one and stopped to talk with her and get some advice about writing.

Probably worth mentioning that Kristina is only a sixteen year old herself.

Kristina started writing Satreih two years ago. She had never planned on being a writer but she saw an interview with Christopher Paolini, the author o the dragonrider trilogy, Eragon, Eldest, and the soon to be released Brisingr, and she was inspired. Paolini was only fifteen when he started his first novel. That got Kristina thinking, and she set to work. She's never heard from Paolini, but she has exchanged letters with D.J. McHale, author of the Pendragon series of fantasy-adventures---which she heartily recommended to the fifteen year old---and McHale gave her lots of advice that she was happy to pass along to young Man Mannion.

First and best, clear your head, clear your desk, and just write. She had the same problem as the fifteen year old when she started, too many ideas, too many characters, but she decided to just plunge ahead.

Kristina describes Satreih as a book for readers who like Lord of the Rings and Harry Potter. I like the opening of the blurb she's written for her book on her website:

Dark cloaks. The stench of corpses. The Spies of Mosiania have invaded
the lands of elves, dwarfs, dragons, witches, centaurs, water nymphs,
and werecats. They’ve surfaced to help evil lord Verteq return to power.

I'm hooked. I'd be reading it now except the fifteen year old won't give it up yet. He's on his second reading, having polished it off for the first time in an hour. This time through he's paying close attention to the character and place names. Kristina invented languages for her various characters and, as in Tolkien, the names have meanings and resonances peculiar to those languages. There's a glossary with a pronounciation key in the book.

Skilling is going to be a junior in high school. As far as she knows, she's the only published author in her school, although she's far from the only writer. There's a very active creative writing club which she belongs to. Kristina's mother was hovering by, but her only job today was to take pictures for the website and look proud, which was easy. Skilling handled the many adults stopping by to talk and buy her book with grace and charm---she sold five or six copies just while we were there, five or six more than many authors at book signings manage to sell in the whole time they're at a bookstore.

Kristina published Satreih herself through iUniverse. This is the future of publishing, I think. Saying a writer has self-published her book is going to be like saying an artist has self-painted a picture or a singer has self-sung a song.

Take a walk around here in the mornings and, as early a bird as you think you’ve been and as purposeful and vigorous as you feel striding forth, you’ll find the streets busy with people showing signs that they’ve been up for hours longer, and the odds are they’re all moving faster than you.

They’re running. They’re biking. They’re power-walking. If they’re young parents out with strollers, they’re pushing those strollers with the determination of rookie lineman on the first day of training camp slamming into blocking sleds. Middle-aged men and women who’ve volunteered for the coffee run carry their cardboard trays loaded with cups steaming from the spouted lids as if coffee-cup carrying was an Olympic event and they’re in training with a good shot at making the US team if only they can shave another .05 seconds off their best time.

Many of these people look as though they’re just continuing exercise routines and regular habits of physical activity, especially the runners. But a good proportion of them are obviously out of shape and long out of practice doing whatever it is they’ve chosen to do to get back into shape. They’re using their vacations to start a program of diet and exercise that you can help thinking won’t last longer than a week or two after they’ve left the Cape. Then there are the ones who’ve just seemed to take it for granted that being on vacation down here means having to get up early, get out the door fast, and get the heart pumping and the blood flowing, and if that means having to actually exercise then what the heck, we can take it. These folks are easy to distinguish from the dammit we’re going to get back into shape crowd by the embarrassed grins on their reddened faces when you meet their eyes as they’re huffing and puffing along or stopping in front of you to lean against a tree or sit down on a curb to rest and secretly pray for some friend to come along in a car and offer them a ride home.

At any rate, you meet with all sorts of conditions on a morning walk, of all ages and all shapes and sizes. Grandmotherly and grandfatherly types toddling briskly along in bright white sneakers without a scuff on them. Fiftysomething men on bikes who look as though the last time they were on one was the day they gave up their paper route. Sweat-soaked jogging thirtysomething fathers with narrow waists and tanned legs smooth and strong as a dancer’s. Whippet-thin teenage girls whose strides seem thrown off by the lack of hurdles on the sidewalks.

Sometimes you meet both types together, the fit and the fat, such as the couple I saw out jogging yesterday morning. She was nut-brown and perfect, a work of the personal trainer’s art, with a bared belly flat and hard enough to bounce pennies off of. He was pale and round and frightening to look at because he looked so clearly frightened for himself, as if he’d just taken his own pulse and was now trying to resign himself to certainly coming heart attack. She was pointedly ignoring his distress. She was already moving at about half the speed she normally ran at and she was wearing an expression that combined irritation and impatience in a way the Disney artists could only dream of when they were drawing Susan Sarandan’s character for the animated sections of Enchanted. They were coming towards me and I was tempted to block their way just to force them to stop so he could rest or attract passing medical attention. But I stepped aside and as they went by I heard him puffing out an embarrassed apology for not being able to keep up.

My hope for their future happiness is based on my convincing myself that they aren’t a couple. I see them as friends or friends of friends, part of a group of couples sharing a vacation house together. For one reason or another her own spouse or partner couldn’t go with her on her usual run this morning, none of the other women in the house wanted to either, and he, seeing his chance to spend some time alone with their little group’s body most beautiful, volunteered to join her, a mistake he’ll never make again.

All sorts and conditions, as I’ve said, running, biking, walking, I see them every morning, but I saw something the other day I’d never seen before. A rollerblader.

Well,of course I’ve seen rollerbladers before. Haven’t seen any down here in a while, not that I can remember, at least, but still. It was this sort and condition of roller blader that was a surprise. A thirtyish woman zipping along down the middle of the street on rollerblades. She moved along confidently, an old pro. I’ll bet she used to do tricks, she was that good. She was tanned evenly and darkly all over and utterly gorgeous and I couldn’t help it, I had to stare. Perfect beauty commands respectful attention. She was enjoying herself immensely and she laughed with me when I laughed at her in joyful surprise. But I wonder if she also spotted the look of concern and horror in my eye along with the stunned admiration.

She was in terrific shape, of course. A near-goddess. So that made the baby bump all the more obvious.

Then, last week, after I brooded miserably on the thought that The bad guys are going to get away, several of my commenters did their best to cheer me up by referencing old movies that somehow seemed to predict the current sad state of things. My favorite came from Doghouse Riley, who advised me:

"Forget it, Lance. It's Chinatown."

Cracked me up.

Didn't make me feel better about Bush and Cheney, but it cracked me up.

And Jason Cravat came through with a riff on The Wild Bunch and HenryFTP brought up Costa-Gavras' Z, and they got me to thinking that it might be interesting to follow up a series on the politically and culturally optimistic Oscar winners of 1967 (even Bonnie and Clyde is mostly a cheerful film) with a look at the some late 60s-early 70s paranoia and nihlism, beginning with those three greats---Chinatown, The Wild Bunch, and Z---and including films like The Conversation, The Parallax View, Three Days of the Condor, MASH, and Network.

What d'ya think?

But my favorite idea so far is to shanghai the Siren herself and force her to host an open thread based on her own post, New York City of the Mind. Frankly, I think she was coyly applying for the job with this one. I mean, look at this line-up:

Rear Window, The Sweet Smell of Success, On the Town, The Lost Weekend, Desperately Seeking Susan, and The Apartment.

How about that?

At any rate, we'll have come up with something soon. Leave your suggestions and votes here or over at newcritics.

Now, all of this presumes there will still be a newcritics website. You can help make sure this. Our fearless leader, Tom Watson, has been maintaining the site on his own, but the recent malware attack forced a move to a new server and that's money out of Tom's pocket. Please help put some back in by following this link and donating a few bucks to the cause.

Meanwhile, I'm feeling a little lost and alone here. I don't know what to do with myself with no movie to discuss.

The fifteen year old's inside watching one of the best of the Star Trek movies, The Undiscovered Country. Anybody want to talk about that?

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Re-opening old threads: As I like to say, the beauty of open-threads is that they can stay open forever. The threads on the first series are still there, waiting for you to read, re-read, and comment upon.